Larson fulfilling prediction Johnson made in preseason
“We’ve never started a year off as good as we have. It makes you work just that much harder to stay this good.” NASCAR driver Kyle Larson, who has three consecutive runner-up finishes
AVONDALE, ARIZ . Before the NASCAR season started, who did seven-time champion Jimmie Johnson expect to be a week-in-week-out contender for wins and a Cup title? “Kyle Larson,” Johnson told
The (Phoenix) Arizona Republic during a visit just before the season-opening Daytona 500. “Now that he’s got a taste of winning, I think he’ll be tough.”
Larson, who got his first Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series victory last season at Michigan International Speedway, didn’t win Sunday’s Camping World 500 at Phoenix Raceway. He finished 0.312 seconds behind surprise winner Ryan Newman. But he left the 1-mile oval as the points leader, six ahead of 2012 series champion Brad Keselowski.
Sure, it’s only four events into the marathon 36-race season. Larson, though, has been consistently at or near the lead in the No. 42 Chevrolet fielded by Chip Ganassi, the multitime Indianapolis 500- and Verizon IndyCar Series-winning team owner.
Larson, who has permission from Ganassi to still run occa- sional dirt-track sprint car races, ran out of fuel on the last lap while leading the Daytona 500 and wound up 12th.
Phoenix was his third consecutive runner-up result and, going back to 2016, his fourth in five starts.
“It means a lot to me to hear a guy like Jimmie say he was going to keep his eye on us,” said Larson, 24. “We’ve just got to keep it going. We’ve never started a year off as good as we have. It makes you work just that much harder to stay this good.
“I’m super-proud of everybody at our race shop, to build fast race cars and make sure we don’t have any parts failures. They are the reason why we are running as well as we are. If we can just keep doing that, be mistake-free on pit road and on the racetrack, the wins are going to come.”
NASCAR’s 20-somethings showed their strength again at Phoenix, surely to the delight of motor sports industry executives striving to attract younger fans. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. (29) finished fourth, reigning Xfinity Series champion Daniel Suarez (25) was seventh and Erik Jones (20) eighth. Chase Elliott (21) led 106 of the 314 laps but struggled on restarts and placed 12th.
“The future has never been brighter with all this young talent,” said winning team owner Richard Childress, involved in NASCAR since the 1970s.
Kyle Busch, 31, won the Cup championship two years ago and isn’t part of stock car racing ’s Millennial movement. In the headlines all week after a postrace brawl on Las Vegas Motor Speedway’s pit road with Joey Logano’s crew that left him with a bleeding forehead, Busch led laps 196-308 until Logano’s accident. He finished an extremely frustrated and tight-lipped third.
“It seems every finish that’s destined for us, we get a worse finish,” Busch said.
Amazingly, for Larson, second place might seem worse.